Justice League

Justice League is the latest animated comic book adaption from the folks who gave us the brilliant Batman series in the early nineties, followed by Superman and Batman Beyond. It follows the same formula of distilling the essence of its source material into fun, colourful, action-oriented adventures, without needless reinvention or modernisation. In other words, no Bat-Visa cards, no nipple-adorned body armour, no Superman Blue/Superman Red, and no "Luthor was a Kryptonian the whole time!" craziness.

Of course, as the comics have given us so many incarnations of the individual characters and the League itself, the creators have had to make some relatively controversial decisions (well, controversial in geeky circles, that is... the rest of us have bigger things to worry about). In the name of gender equality, we have Hawkgirl but no Hawkman. For the sake of racial diversity, a black Green Lantern (John Stewart, a bit player in the comics) has replaced Hal Jordan. But the "big guns" are all present and accounted for: the Flash, Martian Manhunter, Wonder Woman, and of course, Superman and Batman (both sporting slightly altered designs from their previous appearances).

This disc presents the hour-long Secret Origins movie that kick-started the series. We're introduced to our heroes as they battle an invasion of shape-changing, super-strong aliens. Massive three-legged war machines are laying siege to the world's major cities, and alien spies have infiltrated the government and the military. There's not a heck of a lot of originality here, but the sheer verve and scale of the story makes it easily digestable.

The character designs are obviously from the pen of the great Bruce Timm... bold, elegant, simple yet powerful (although I do prefer the "old-style" Batman and Superman). The animation is beautiful, with enough pop and crackle to assure us that big bucks were spent on this opening salvo (for television budgets at any rate). And the voice casting is top notch. A classy show - it's just a tragic shame about the...

I don't want to sound too hyperbolic - after all, in this day and age, we should all have much greater concerns than the video quality of a cartoon DVD - but the transfer presented to us by Warner Bros is a complete and utter disgrace, which is so bad that it's pretty much unwatchable. Warners have decided that we aren't worthy of a PAL transfer, which means that:

- if you don't have an NTSC compatible system, forget it.

- if you do have an NTSC compatible system, you'll be subjected to the worst aliasing that this reviewer has ever seen on a DVD. Every line that isn't perfectly vertical or horizontal is transformed into a mess of jagged pixels. And every pan or zoom suffers from a terribly distracting judder.

The box does feature a prominent label warning the purchaser that this is NTSC only, but that doesn't stop it from being an insult to Warners' audience.

But wait, there's more... we get a full screen, non-enhanced image taken from a widescreen source. Heck, even the Cartoon Channel plays the episodes at the proper aspect ratio! If it's good enough for them, why isn't it good enough for the DVD audience?

A few months ago, Warners released Batman Beyond: Return of the Joker with a gorgeous PAL widescreen transfer. Now THAT is what the paying public deserve!

As much as I'm a fan of these shows, I'd rather that they were not released at all than see people spend hard-earned cash on these poorly executed travesties.

Okay, this is better news. We get a very effective Dolby Digital 2.0 soundtrack. Voices are crisp and clear, and the sound effects - especially during those OTT action scenes - will give your speakers a good workout (well, two of them anyway). And the bombastic, operatic music score works well too.

A collection of beautiful (albeit static) menus give us access to an unremarkable collection of extras.

Character bios for our seven heroes amount to a nice picture gallery with some fairly mundane text, but the kids might enjoy.

Cast and crew will help you out if you have a nagging need to see who wrote the script or voiced the Flash, and can't be bothered skipping to the end credits.

We get trailers for Batman Beyond: Return of the Joker, Batman: Subzero, the Batman & Superman Movie, and a Scooby Doo cartoon release.

There's some DVD-ROM content which I couldn't view but, if it's the same as the US version, it's just a few web links.

And finally, there's a nice double-sided poster included in the package: the Justice League cover on one side, and Samurai Jack on the other.

Justice League kicks off with a cool story arc that will entertain the kids as well as grown-ups who haven't grown up. Well, assuming that they can SEE it, that is. The show is great, but the video transfer is so bad that there's no way you'll be able to watch the full 60 minutes without your eyes bleeding.

Oh, and we only get an hour's worth of toon for our money... couldn't Warners have given us a bonus episode or three, as they traditionally do?